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Comment by Klonoar | Hacker News Reader

Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not.

Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?

Anyone can make an account, though, and instantly access that content, so Elon doesn't really have any leg to stand on by claiming they're private. It's not the same as Cambridge Analytica scraping stuff you had to have certain privileges to see by tricking the system into granting those privileges.

Elon unfortunately may have a leg to stand on, because it doesn't functionally matter whether "anyone can make an account and see it". I don't believe any legal ruling to date has been fine with that distinction.

Do you mean this will be the first legal ruling about this particular variation of the issue?

Not true. Creating an account requires agreeing to the ToS. And if the ToS prohibit this kind of usage, then legally, it's not allowed.

See hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn. hiQ was scraping LinkedIn using accounts, and they were found to be in breach of LinkedIn's terms.

It depends what you mean by "not allowed". Breaking ToS isn't a crime, but you might be sued for damages, but how can they show there were any damages?

It seems pretty easy? Someone viewing it through a mirror isn't going to see ads.

But if they ban the nitter operator surely you can't just bypass that ban legally by making a new X account. That there are bans and the operator has to bypass bans by pretending to be a new person I think that this makes it different.

It's like a club that checks ids to ban people. I wouldn't call that club open to the general public.

Nor would it be illegal to report outside of the club about things people said in the club.

To fix this:

1) Nitter offers a deal: download our browser extension, sign up for Twitter, and we'll give you some kind of perk (Amazon credits, whatever).

2) Browser extension surfs Twitter on the user's behalf, scraping and sending copies to Nitter.

3) We find out how serious the legal system is about prosecuting scraping.

The whole point is not signing up for twitter. If signing up for twitter wasn't a problem, Nitter wouldn't exist in the first place.

But the fact remains, people continue to sign up for Twitter. As long as that's the case, Nitter should probably try to take advantage of it.

The account on its own is worthless - the problem with Twitter is not that people have accounts.

Tall order. The main Nitter instances were using tens of thousands of accounts to evade detection, IIRC. Adding money to the mix creates more legal liability and a paper trail towards people who can be sued.

It's much easier if thousands of people set up their own Nitter instances.

Aurora Store does the same thing to facilitate downloading Play Store apps.

Yes, that's what they went on to point out.

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